The news media is awash in articles
lamenting the sorry state of journalism. The problem is: according
to the relentless logic of the marketplace, the return on investment
from funding traditional newsrooms is too low to justify their
continued existence. Furthermore, because of the Internet, content
can now be accessed for free and ad revenues are no longer sufficient
to subsidize substantial news gathering. Yet America needs a
diverse, independent press to act as a watchdog on both government
and the private sector.

In this article I argue that the
decline of privately funded journalism is to be expected; I present
the case for public funding of journalism; and, perhaps most
importantly, I address libertarian objections to such public funding,

Journalism as a public good

Americans have taken it for granted
that privately held news organizations would devote sufficient
resources to investigative journalism. But is it reasonable to rely
on the good will of private. for-profit news corporations to perform
the very necessary service of investigative journalism?

Even in the days before the Internet,
when newspapers made good money, investigative journalism emerged
serendipitously and quite unreliably as a by-product of the
real products in demand: entertainment, classified ads, gossip, and
financial information.

As a society, we delegate
responsibility for public safety and the courts to specialized public
servants who are expected to uphold high standards of professionalism
and objectivity. We pay police, prosecutors and judges to ferret
out the facts and apply the law impartially. Investigative
journalism is equally essential to the well-being of society, and we
shouldn't expect for-profit private corporations to find the truth
about news either. Journalists, like police and judges, should be
shielded from commercial considerations.

A well-funded, independent press is a
public good, akin to police protection, courts, transit, national
defense, childhood immunization, clean air, and banking regulations.
For such public goods, for which the benefits accrue to everyone, a
market-based approach is infeasible, since allowing people the choice
not to contribute would undermine the system: people would
'free-load' and rely on other people to pay for it. Consequently,
government tax revenues should be used to fund news gathering and
investigative journalism, and we should construct a wall separating
public funding from political interference.

The overstated risks of political
interference

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The standard argument against
government funded journalism is that there are risks of political
interference. But as argued by Richard Baker in How
to Save the News, "There are numerous democratic nations with
public broadcasting systems that are both well funded by their
central government and also well shielded from its political
influence." Indeed, " Better
funding for All Things
Considered on NPR or
NewsHour
on PBS will not turn either program into a propaganda outfit for the
government. The BBC is not Pravda ,
and Japan and most of Europe, which have enjoyed extremely
well-funded public media for decades, are not a network of
totalitarian states. "

In
How
to Save Journalism John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney write ,
"Perhaps the strongest
contemporary case for journalism subsidies is provided by other
democracies. The evidence shows that subsidies do not infringe on
liberty or justice; they correlate with the indicators of a good
society. In The
Economist 's annual
Democracy Index, which evaluates nations on the basis of the
functioning of government, civic participation, civil liberties,
political culture and pluralism, the six top-ranked nations maintain
some of the most generous journalism subsidies on the planet....
Freedom House ranks the heavy subsidizing nations of Northern
Europe in the top six spots on its 2008 list of nations with the
freest news media. The United States ties for twenty-first."

In reality, any wall separating a
publicly subsidized press from political interference must be porous:
we mustn't fund traitors who support Al Qaeda or crackpots who
promote Holocaust denial theories. But the risks of interference
are overstated, and the alternative to government funding seems dire:
news and opinion increasingly sold to the highest bidder or omitted
entirely in favor of speculation, hearsay, spin, and entertainment.

America under-funds public
broadcasting

According to a report
by the Center for American Progress, Germany and Great Britain spend
over $80 per capita on public broadcasting annually; Canada and
Australia spend $28; the US spends a measly $1.70. In 2007 the U.S.
spent about $480 million in total on public broadcasting. That's
about the same as what it costs the military to occupy Iraq for two
and a half days and a small fraction of the funds used to bailout
banks and Wall Street. Yet for years Republicans have been trying to
cut even that funding.

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Nichols and McChesney report that
America's founders understood the vital importance of the press and
gave large subsidies to newspapers and magazines in the form of
reduced postal rates. Nichols and McChesney write,
"If, for example, the United States had devoted the same percentage
of its GDP to journalism subsidies in 2009 as it did in the 1840s, we
calculate that the allocation would have been $30 billion. In
contrast, the federal subsidy last year for all of public
broadcasting, not just journalism, was around $400 million.... Only
an extreme libertarian or a nihilist would argue to end all public
support of higher education to eliminate the threat of [political
interference by educators]... Likewise, the government does not tax
church property or income, which is in effect a massive subsidy of
organized religion. Yet the government has not favored particular
religions or required people to hold religious views."